Experts warned at a conference in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday of a critical shortage of global specialists trained to confront increasingly malicious cyber security threats.
“Some reports say that we have globally less than 1,000 people who are truly qualified, whereas we need over 30,000 to address the problem,” said Mark Goodwin, of Virginia Tech university in the United States.
What we’re seeing is cyber espionage and cyber sabotage that warrants that we have increasingly skilled people to address this threat
His comments were made at a symposium on command and control and countersecurity organised by King Saud University with the interior ministry.
“We need a national framework for capacity building,” Saleh Ibrahim al-Motairi, general director of the kingdom’s new National Cybersecurity Centre, told the same forum.
Human resources are the most important element and technology is number two
It would try to further knowledge about cybercrime, Motairi said.
We need capacity building and this is one of the main challenges that we face in the kingdom and the region,” said Abdul Rahman al-Muagle, Information Technology manager at the Saudi Aramco oi company.
The experts’ call comes after an attack on France’s TV5Monde this month showed the growing impact of cyber attacks.The hack, claimed by Islamic State group jihadists, shut the global network’s transmissions and website.
We have never focused on security so no wonder you cannot find decent security staff. Now they are trying to train thousands of them, I don’t know if that’s going to work out. You need a specific mind to be good at security … Which cannot be taught …